Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement

Living in the Future

Living in the Future

Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement

Victoria W. Wolcott

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81725-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81727-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226817279.001.0001

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Meijer Foundation Fund.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wolcott, Victoria W., author.

Title: Living in the future : utopianism and the long Civil Rights Movement / Victoria W. Wolcott.

Other titles: Utopianism and the long Civil Rights Movement

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021035849 | ISBN 9780226817255 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226817279 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Civil rights movements—United States. | Pacifism—United States. | Utopias.

Classification: LCC E185.61 .W8 2022 | DDC 323.0973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035849

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my daughters:

Nora and Maya

Contents

List of Illustrations, Table, and Map

Introduction

Chapter 1  The Workers

Chapter 2  The Cooperators

Chapter 3  The Divinites

Chapter 4  The Fellowshippers

Chapter 5  The Pacifists

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustrations, Table, and Map

Figure 1.1  Floria Pinkney at Brookwood Labor College

Figure 1.2  Thomas Dabney at Brookwood Labor College

Figure 1.3  The Brookwood Labor Players’ bus

Figure 1.4  Septima Clark and Rosa Parks at Highlander

Figure 1.5  Martin Luther King Jr. billboard

Figure 2.1  Blacks and whites working together at the Delta Cooperative Farm

Figure 2.2  Children at the Delta Cooperative Farm

Figure 2.3  Cabins at the Delta Cooperative Farm

Figure 3.1  Father Divine at a Peace Mission banquet

Map 3.1  Father Divine’s Communities in Ulster County

Table 3.1  Major Peace Missions in Ulster County

Figure 3.2  Peace Mission Parade in Harlem

Figure 4.1  The Thurmans and the Carrolls in India

Figure 4.2  Gandhi meeting with Sue Bailey Thurman

Figure 4.3  Marjorie Penney

Figure 4.4  Fellowship House Seder

Figure 5.1  Journey of Reconciliation participants

Introduction

We want freedom now. . . . We do not want freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another 150 years.

Martin Luther King Jr.¹

In the spring of 1952, a young African American woman, Coretta Scott, gave a book to a seminary student she had befriended. The book was Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, which predicted a socialist America. A graduate of the progressive Antioch College, Scott was active in the pacifist movement and closely followed the nonviolent direct-action work of Bayard Rustin. She inscribed her gift, Dear Martin, I should be interested to know your reaction to Bellamy’s predictions about our society. Martin Luther King Jr. responded in a long letter two months later: I welcomed the book because much of its content is in line with my basic ideas. I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. . . . Today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. He finished his letter, Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.² Bellamy’s imagined socialist and egalitarian future helped shape the twentieth century’s most powerful social movement. And while utopian thought and writing influenced Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr., some of their contemporaries went even further and lived their utopian dreams, creating small communities that modeled Bellamy’s vision.

Two years before reading Looking Backward, King was introduced to Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings at the Fellowship House in Philadelphia. The Fellowship House was part of a matrix of interracial communities that provided a safe haven for activists and trained them through a radical pedagogy. Although each had its own unique history, they were utopian in their rejection of gradualism and their demands for immediate change. And they lived according to these values in the present, rather than waiting for complete societal transformation. The activists who inhabited these communities were neither racial liberals employing moral suasion, nor were they part of the communist Left. Rather they were socialist in orientation and deeply influenced a generation of activists in the interconnected labor, civil rights, and peace movements. From the 1920s through the 1960s, they built labor colleges, folk schools, ashrams, interracial churches, and urban and rural cooperatives. This book traces the connections between those institutions: workers’ education schools such as Brookwood Labor College and Highlander Folk School, a Mississippi cooperative, the Father Divine movement, Fellowship Houses and churches, and a myriad of pacifist and civil rights organizations and enclaves.

Three central tenets united the activists who demanded immediate change in the face of racial and economic inequality. They believed in building cooperatives as an alternative to capitalism. They practiced interracialism in their religious worship, social activism, and communal housing. And they developed a form of Gandhian nonviolent direct action that was more aggressive than the passive resistance promoted by the traditional pacifist peace churches, such as the Quakers and Mennonites. By living cooperatively and communally, they created a new reality that served as a model for civil rights activists. More pragmatically, the members of these communities trained activists in radical nonviolence and created real change in the economic and political fortunes of African Americans. This history also suggests lessons for contemporary social movements. The small-scale communities that are emblematic of American utopianism acted as a leavening agent for large-scale social justice movements. In isolation, these communities could be marginalized, but by training activists, publicizing their work, and envisioning a new world, transformational change was possible. Living in experimental communities also acted as a buffer against reactionary politics, which views radical breaks as inherently dangerous and destabilizing. King’s reading of Bellamy, for example, helped him to envision an egalitarian future and develop tactics to hasten its arrival.

Because utopian ideas and practices proved so generative in the long civil rights movement, we should not overlook their centrality. But deploying the concept of utopia comes with its own dilemmas, inherent in its coining by Sir Thomas More in 1516. More combined the Greek word for place (topos) with the u from the word for no (ou) to construct utopia (no place).³ Thus, from the term’s inception, people considered utopias to be fantastical and out of reach, a world best left to fiction rather than lived reality.⁴ But the social imagination necessary to envision utopia could also power dramatic social change by insisting on freedom now, in King’s words. The activists who circulated among folk schools, communes, and Fellowship Houses also insisted on freedom now. Their work was linked with a long history of utopian communalism and intentional communities within the United States.⁵ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both religious and secular utopian communities proliferated, including cooperative towns founded by British utopianist Robert Owen and millenarian religious groups such as the Shakers. By the early twentieth century, utopian communities ranged from anarchist and single-tax enclaves to student cooperatives and Christian socialist communities.

But what made them utopian? The political scientist Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopianism as a form of social dreaming that allows communities to envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live.⁶ Similarly, Robin D. G. Kelley writes about the freedom dreams of the Black community: I have come to realize that once we strip radical social movements down to their bare essence and understand the collective desires of people in motion, freedom and love lay at the very heart of the matter.⁷ These freedom dreams could not wait for an imagined future. For those, like King, who hoped for a warless world and a socialistic future, utopian dreaming required transformative experimentation in the present. The militant optimism of utopianists was not complacent or passive. They put their bodies on the line. Civil rights and peace activists, like Bayard Rustin, languished in prisons and embarked on hunger strikes. Labor organizers manning picket lines suffered the blows of police and were attacked by white mobs. And intentional communities like the Delta Cooperative Farm and Highlander Folk School were under constant threat by white supremacists and state authorities. The social dreams of utopia sometimes elicited a waking nightmare of reactionary violence.

For progressive thinkers, utopianism has long been an arena of conflict. Edward Bellamy was part of a group of utopian socialists in the late nineteenth century that scientific socialists, or followers of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, widely criticized.⁸ Utopian socialists did not believe in revolution, or at least not in violent revolution. For this reason, scientific socialists were disdainful of Bellamy, whose novel Looking Backward suggested that a peaceful but swift evolution of society would lead to a socialist utopia.⁹ Marx decried Bellamy and his followers’ lack of class analysis and their claims of universal emancipation, cooperation, and brotherhood. Because Bellamy posited a velvet revolution, his ideas became popular among pacifists who feared the chaos of class conflict but still desired revolutionary change.¹⁰ This idea of peaceful revolution was central to utopian socialists and radical pacifists well into the twentieth century. In 1940, for example, the famed white pacifist A. J. Muste called for pacifism as a revolutionary strategy.¹¹ The desire to prevent violence meant that some utopianists had an ambivalent relationship to strikes and other working-class political action. And they openly criticized the sectarian politics of the communist Left. But their goals paralleled those of other radical thinkers, a new society. They wanted a revolution, a nonviolent revolution.

Utopian socialists’ framework for social change involved giving the ends and means of social struggle the same weight. The white British author Aldous Huxley, highly influential in pacifist and radical circles, was one popularizer of this model. Best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World, Huxley was an active promoter of utopian thought and practice. While living in California during the 1930s, utopian socialists introduced Huxley to Vedanta mysticism, a philosophical branch of Hinduism, and he later wrote a utopian novel, Island.¹² His 1937 essay collection, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals, was widely read by political radicals. In this work he promotes nonviolent solutions to revolutionary change. On cooperatives, a key institution for utopian socialists, Huxley writes, "Co-operatives and mixed concerns already exist and work extremely well. To increase their numbers and to extend their scope would not seem a revolutionary act. . . . In its effects, however, the act would be revolutionary; for it would result in a profound modification of the existing system."¹³ Cooperatives provided a revolutionary end through peaceful means, ameliorating the worst excesses of capitalism and promoting egalitarianism.

The relationship between means and ends is also captured in the term prefigurative, coined by the political scientist Carl Boggs in 1977: By ‘prefigurative,’ I mean the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.¹⁴ Like Huxley, Boggs identified movements where the means and ends converged. And he characterized the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s as the recipient and popularizer of this tradition. Sociologist Wini Breines, in her 1982 work The Great Refusal, expands on the prefigurative nature of New Left politics. This politics encompasses the effort to build community, to create and prefigure in lived action and behavior the desired society, the emphasis on means and not ends, the spontaneous and utopian experiments that developed in the midst of action while working toward the ultimate goal of a free and democratic society.¹⁵ Central to this concept was the creation of counter-institutions, like the cooperatives, ashrams, and interracial churches activists founded in the mid-twentieth century.¹⁶ But while we associate New Left politics with such counter-institutions, in fact a generation of Old Left activists pioneered these practices.

This amnesia about earlier experimentation reflects the fact that the New Left’s prefigurative politics emerged from what appeared to be a relatively conformist and contained post–World War II nation that rejected utopianism. In the late 1940s, the twin horrors of fascism and Stalinism suggested to many liberals that utopian thinking was dangerous. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center, Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology, and Judith Shklar’s After Utopia, as well as texts by political philosophers Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, argue that utopian thinking had led to totalitarianism.¹⁷ These works emphasize the horrendous costs of blueprint utopias that were inflexible and dictatorial.¹⁸ The urge to construct grand designs for the political future of mankind, notes Shklar, is gone. The last vestiges of utopian faith required for such an enterprise have vanished.¹⁹ The anti-utopian thinking of the mid-twentieth century inaccurately tied totalitarian states to American utopian communities. But cooperation, not domination, was a central tenet of communal utopianism. Indeed, most radical pacifists, who generally defined themselves as socialists or anarchists, were deeply critical of the Soviet Union and were among the first to speak out about the dangers of fascism.

Anti-utopian arguments corresponded with the rise of the cold war in the late 1940s and the decline of the labor movement. These powerful trends masked the ongoing organizing work of radical pacifists and their increased affiliation with the Black freedom struggle. Some formed small intentional communities. But these communities did not mark a retreat from politics, as activists trained others in nonviolent direct action and published political and intellectual works calling for mass resistance. Their social dreaming and hopeful utopian planning proved more effective in building a mass movement than most observers could imagine. In The Vital Center (1949), liberal pragmatist Schlesinger lambasts such dreaming: On the one hand are the politicians, the administrators, the doers; on the other, the sentimentalists, the utopians, the wailers. Writing about civil rights in the wake of President Truman’s 1947 report on civil rights, To Secure These Rights, Schlesinger believed that the politicians and administrators could address this vital problem. The South on the whole accepts the objectives of the civil rights program as legitimate, argues Schlesinger, even though it may have serious and intelligible reservations about timing and method.²⁰ In fact, the South on the whole fought against the civil rights movement with violent terror and racist laws. It was Schlesinger’s utopians and wailers who challenged their power directly and, with time, won many battles. Thus, the mistakes of midcentury intellectuals, who dismissed radical pacifism, should not blind us to the vital role of utopianism.

Of the three central tenets—cooperatives, interracialism, and nonviolence—that bound utopian socialist communities together, interracialism most directly challenged the laws and mores of Jim Crow America. But the ideological and practical forms of interracialism varied. Some activists, like those who ran Fellowship Houses or YWCA and YMCA programs, promoted a liberal interracialism that viewed education and moral suasion as the primary way to foster racial understanding. This work was valuable as liberal interracialists created spaces for dialogue and fought against white supremacy. But their efforts were often limited to elites, and they generally argued for a gradual approach rather than immediacy. Krishnalal Shridharani, one of the leading interpreters of Gandhi for American pacifists, wrote in 1941: Many an isolated reformer has organized inter-racial house parties and dances, and this Y.M.C.A. method does bring a few Negro girls and boys in contact with a few whites. But it is a process of individual reform and not a broad social solution.²¹ A broader social solution required a more direct challenge to segregation than education and conversation would allow.

In contrast, labor interracialists, such as those who ran Brookwood Labor College and founded Highlander Folk School, fostered a class-based movement to create strategic alliances across racial lines. First generated by progressive unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and propagated through workers’ education, labor interracialism elevated racial cooperation among the working classes to foster a more egalitarian future. In the 1920s, Black socialists such as A. Philip Randolph also took up the mantle of labor interracialism, and the Communist Party soon joined these efforts, promoting interracial alliances to build a broad pro-labor coalition. During the Great Depression, leftist activists built a popular front of like-minded radicals to address racial violence and economic disenfranchisement.²² These labor interracialists envisioned a future of full racial equality and lived that future in the present by integrating their unions and social movement organizations.

Finally, utopian interracialism went beyond these more strategic approaches. Utopian communities, such as Father Divine’s Peace Mission and the Harlem Ashram, called for immediate and radical change and prefigured that change by sharing labor, property, and politics. These groups took up nonviolent direct action as the most effective means to challenge racial segregation and inequality through wide-scale training and implementation. Utopian interracialism often subverted racial hierarchies. White followers of Father Divine, for example, accepted the diminutive African American man as an embodiment of God himself. Black Nationalists such as Floyd McKissick, who created the utopian town Soul City, also inverted racial hierarchies when reaching out to white allies. Soul City will be an attempt to move into the future, explains McKissick, a future where black people welcome white people as equals.²³ In these cases, Black leaders and activists invited white people to join them, a model in sharp contrast to both liberal and labor interracialism, which often originated with white leaders and activists. Radical pacifists in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) also practiced utopian interracialism in their communal homes and training centers. This culture and politics later became central to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) when they launched major civil rights campaigns in 1960. Thus, far from being a uniform and moderate call for integration, interracialism contained revolutionary potential driven by utopian freedom dreams.

A second tenet that profoundly shaped the work of utopian socialists and radical pacifists was a commitment to cooperatives as an economic alternative to capitalism and as a broader metaphor for unity across class, race, and gender lines. Since the nineteenth century, cooperatives have been a central component of European and American utopian communities. America’s mid-twentieth-century cooperatives were generally modeled after the Rochdale cooperative system in England, founded in 1844 by a group of weavers who formed the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. The Pioneers drew up a set of Principles, which allowed their cooperative to be replicated internationally. Rochdale cooperatives refused to discriminate in their membership and offered everyone an equal vote. Workers founded the first American cooperatives based on Rochdale’s rules in 1863, and they proliferated throughout the late nineteenth century.²⁴ Because of the egalitarian nature of the Rochdale system, these cooperatives often promoted interracialism. As a character in Upton Sinclair’s 1936 novel Co-op: A Novel of Living Together states, A true co-operative has to be based on human brotherhood; we ought to state at the outset that we are open to all men without distinction of race or color or creed or party.²⁵ African Americans found cooperatives particularly appealing, as they allowed them to maximize scarce resources in the decades following emancipation. In addition to providing some economic independence, Black cooperatives were an expression of political power and self-help. In the first decades of the twentieth century, African American leaders, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Ella Baker, and A. Philip Randolph worked to promote both consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives as viable economic solutions to Black economic problems. By the 1970s, Black cooperatives, particularly in the agricultural South, became a major project of Black Nationalist organizers. And today, cooperatives play a central role in both urban and rural experiments in social activism, from Detroit to rural Mississippi.

White utopian socialists in the early twentieth century who promoted labor interracialism also embraced cooperatives. Progressive workers’ education and folk schools trained their Black and white students in how to run cooperatives, most notably at Brookwood Labor College and Highlander Folk School. Indeed, these schools were run as cooperatives similar to nineteenth-century utopian communities, such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony colony in Indiana. But it was during the Great Depression that the cooperative movement was at its strongest. Two examples exemplify this trend. The Delta and Providence cooperative farms in rural Mississippi were highly influential model communities that drew hundreds of outside activists and influenced New Deal programs. Founded by a white Protestant missionary, Sherwood Eddy, the farms provided housing and a cooperative livelihood for Black and white sharecroppers who had been kicked off their land and terrorized during the height of the Great Depression. The farms largely disbanded after white supremacists’ attacks in the mid-1950s, but their legacy was felt when a decade later Mississippi was at the front lines of the civil rights movement. Freedom Summer in 1964 brought young volunteers to rural Mississippi, much as the farms had decades earlier. And through the 1960s and 1970s, there were numerous experiments in cooperative farming in Mississippi that offset rural Black poverty and built on the cooperative farms’ legacy.

But the most successful interracial cooperative was the Father Divine Peace Mission, a utopian community that erased racial categories altogether and blurred gender lines. The labor interracialism of workers’ education schools and the Delta and Providence cooperative farms challenged a segregated society. But Father Divine promoted a utopian interracialism that actively challenged segregation using nonviolent direct action and provided housing, recreation, and sustenance to thousands devastated by the Great Depression. Father Divine borrowed from earlier utopian communities, including the Shakers, by promoting celibacy, owning property in common, and instituting a matrix of cooperatives. His followers were angels who lived their heaven on earth by creating the society they envisioned. Divinites, however, were also deeply political. They purchased property in white communities to challenge the color line, and by the early 1940s they used nonviolent direct action to challenge segregated public accommodations. Thousands of Divinites also took to the streets of Harlem in support of the Scottsboro Boys, Black teenagers accused of rape and facing execution, and anti-lynching legislation. And the Peace Mission’s low-cost hotels, restaurants, and resorts were open to all, providing much-needed leisure to African Americans who had to negotiate a segregated landscape. Although often dismissed by his contemporaries as a charlatan, Father Divine demonstrated that cooperation combined with religious teachings and a utopian perspective could prove highly attractive to both Black and white people.

The third belief system that united the utopian experiments was nonviolence, and by the late 1930s it was the application of Gandhian nonviolent direct action to the American context. Those most engaged in labor interracialism, particularly at the Highlander Folk School, did not always fully embrace nonviolence. Myles Horton, Highlander’s white founder, had seen horrific brutality unleashed against southern workers attempting to organize and would not fully commit to pacifism.²⁶ But the primary figures of workers’ education institutions, Fellowship Houses and churches, and early civil rights organizations identified as pacifist, and most were active members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). For example, Howard Thurman, a Black theologian who was the first African American to meet Gandhi, helped establish San Francisco’s Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, an ecumenical and interracial religious center. And Marjorie Penney, a white Quaker woman from Pennsylvania, led the interracial Fellowship House for several decades starting in the early 1930s.

While they initially stopped short of the utopian interracialism of the Divine movement or CORE, Fellowship Houses and churches communicated Gandhian ideas and trained a new generation of radical pacifists. Thurman’s religious teachings, particularly his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited, profoundly influenced Martin Luther King Jr. and the major organizers of CORE. Penney’s connections spanned from the founders of the Delta and Providence farms to major civil rights leaders, who used Fellowship Houses as their organizing base. By the 1950s, fellowshippers began to engage more actively with radical nonviolence, and in the early 1960s, they became important participants in the mass civil rights movement. Training for the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s, for example, took place at Fellowship Houses where seasoned pacifists worked with young student volunteers.

By the 1940s and 1950s, a matrix of intentional communities and an expansion of nonviolent direct-action training by FOR and CORE situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center of the civil rights movement. Young activists who embraced radical pacifism founded utopian communities such as Ahimsa Farm in Ohio and the Harlem and Newark Ashrams. They carried out desegregation campaigns and developed workshops to train other activists. CORE and FOR members circulated through these communities and expanded their training efforts across the country, teaching hundreds of workshops and race relations institutes. These activists convinced A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement (MOWM) to embrace nonviolent direct action and wore down mainstream civil rights organizations’ resistance to nonviolence, which they had viewed as lawbreaking and too dangerous. By the early 1950s, more radical civil rights groups, such as the Peacemakers, called for communal living, nonpayment of taxes, and total nonresistance when engaging in protests. Pacifist farms, such as Koinonia and Macedonia in Georgia, echoed the cooperative and communal Brookwood, Highlander, and Delta and Providence farms. These served as crucial havens for exhausted activists recovering from violent civil rights campaigns as the southern struggle escalated. By the time of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, a cadre of well-trained activists could be deployed to the emerging civil rights hotspots. Most had experienced the utopian interracialism of an ashram, a Fellowship House, or an interracial church.

Many radical pacifists also had in common an ecumenical and prophetic Christian faith that propelled their utopian experimentation.²⁷ They were part of what broadly can be termed the Christian Left. Following theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and departing from the optimistic liberalism of the Progressive Era’s Social Gospel movement, they expressed little faith in American institutions and the prospect for gradual societal change.²⁸ Instead, leaders such as Muste modeled themselves after the Hebrew prophets and viewed the world as inherently sinful.²⁹ Muste wrote in 1940, Our concern has been with the problems and crisis of modern civilization as a whole; with the achievement of a dynamic, beautiful, and noble social order, the realization of the ancient prophetic dream of the Kingdom of God on earth.³⁰ This prophetic tradition resonated strongly with African Americans, who had long practiced what historian Gary Dorrien terms the black social gospel, which combined an emphasis on black dignity and personhood with protest activism for racial justice, a comprehensive social justice agenda, an insistence that authentic Christian faith is incompatible with racial prejudice.³¹ These traditions met in the cotton fields of Mississippi, at labor colleges, and in radical pacifist circles.

In order to create Muste’s kingdom on earth, Christians needed to engage with the world politically, both at home and abroad. Theologians of the prophetic tradition internationalized their teachings by creating the World Council of Churches in 1937 and promoting missionary work worldwide. Christian Left activists traveled extensively, visiting experimental folk schools in Denmark, Soviet industrial cities, and South Asian ashrams. Christian pacifists, such as the white British activist Muriel Lester, circulated globally, visiting utopian communities and pacifist communes from India to North America.³² Leaders of the Christian Left, particularly Howard Thurman, also incorporated mysticism in their religious teachings and practices. While traveling in South Asia, where he met with Gandhi, Thurman experienced a mystical vision that inspired him to build the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco.

Less often recognized as part of this tradition, the Father Divine Peace Mission movement also drew from mystical beliefs as Father Divine and his followers sought a union with God. This unity with the sacred undergirded Divine’s teaching that racial divisions were illusory and all humans were equal. Divine also drew from the nineteenth-century Protestant New Thought tradition that argued that the power of the mind could heal a sick body and create a prosperous life. The Peace Mission’s cooperative empire and well-fed followers provided evidence for these teachings’ efficacy, which proved attractive to Black and white seekers. Like Thurman, Father Divine immersed himself in the teachings of Gandhi and Eastern religion. This mystical element of the Christian Left was more prevalent in the utopian communities of pacifists and socialists than mainstream civil rights groups. And it allowed activists to pursue their freedom dreams through meditation, imagination, and reverie.

Although Protestant activists make up the majority of the groups in this study, the Catholic Worker Movement also served as a model for small pacifist communes and the possibilities of labor interracialism. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started the Catholic Worker Movement in May 1933, calling for houses of hospitality and farming communes for the unemployed and suffering. These offered non-state solutions for poverty-stricken women and men in the depths of the Great Depression. Before founding the movement, Day spent her young adulthood as a journalist and writer working in New York City among the Greenwich Village avant-garde, sometimes known as the lyrical left. These years, which also saw the rise of workers’ education and social unionism, were suffused with a utopian excitement. Day remembers, Each of the radical groups had its own vision, and each was terrified that immediate gains would make the masses content and not willing to go further toward the new earth they were envisioning.³³ During this period, she wrote for progressive publications including the Call and the Masses, spending long evenings with playwright Eugene O’Neill and an eclectic group of socialists, anarchists, and communists.

After her conversion to Catholicism in 1927, Day embraced a voluntary poverty and with the help of the French thinker Peter Maurin launched her movement in 1933.³⁴ The movement’s publication, the Catholic Worker, became the primary means of spreading Day and Maurin’s message of peace and equality. And it reflected some of the same utopian spirit of Day’s radical youth. One of Maurin’s Easy Essays, short and catchy poems he used to communicate their teachings, was titled The Case for Utopia. The world would be better off, begins the poem, if people tried to become better. And people would become better if they stopped trying to become better off.³⁵ This work appeared in the inaugural issue, which also documented the struggles of Black sharecroppers in the rural South. The most visible sign of the movement’s commitment to interracialism was on the Catholic Worker’s masthead: a Black worker and a white worker shaking hands. This image was the suggestion of Arthur Falls, an African American doctor in Chicago who wrote to Day after reading the first issue. Falls headed up the Catholic Worker house in Chicago and made interracialism a centerpiece of Catholic activism in that city. Berenice Fisher, one of the founding members of CORE, consulted with Falls when launching the civil rights group in 1940. But even in Chicago, the Catholic Worker Movement was predominantly white and focused primarily on supporting the labor movement.³⁶ While they called for racial tolerance and always allowed African Americans full access to their houses of hospitality, racial politics and civil rights were not at the forefront of the movement.

The Catholic Workers’ closest relationships with civil rights activists centered around their shared commitment to pacifism. Muste and Day, who were friends and admired each other deeply, helped shepherd in a pacifist culture in the 1930s and 1940s that would profoundly impact emerging civil rights organizations such as CORE, as well as pacifist organizations like the Peacemakers.³⁷ The houses of hospitalities were also model small pacifist communes, leading the white pacifist David Dellinger to reach out to his Catholic Worker friends when he established the Newark Ashram in the early 1940s.³⁸ Dellinger was also attracted to the Catholic Workers’ anarchist tendencies. They were anti-statist, decentralized, and made up of a loose network of small communities. An ideal world, for Day and many of her followers, would consist of intentional communities without a controlling and alienating state apparatus.³⁹ Many of the Protestant pacifists in this study had a similar vision. White FOR member Douglas Steere, for example, called for small groups to form peace cells that would be the vigilant guardian of the rights of the under-privileged in its community and should know at first hand the problems and their treatment.⁴⁰ And the workers’ education schools, Fellowship Houses, and cooperatives were all independent of government funding and support. Some pacifists, such as those in the Peacemakers, refused to pay taxes to support increased militarism, a view shared by Day. And Father Divine’s Peace Mission and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement both refused to accept any government welfare.

Anarchism was also a major ideological source for the more secular branch of the pacifist movement, particularly the War Resisters League